Oded Ezer

By Oded Ezer: I’m a typographer, and my profession is typography. Modern typography actually includes technologic opportunities like 3 Dimensions, work with materials, motion graphics, name it, whatever. Everything is typography. There are some people who insist on defining what I do, labelling it under such titles as art or lettering, installation or science. No matter what label it is, it is their issue not mine. I am a typographer in the 21st century and this is how it looks.

I get my inspiration from everything. Literally from everything. Inspiration, in my opinion, is to be capable enough to absorb the total culture that surrounds us, like movies, architecture, history, modern philosophy, even your mother’s cake. You can proceed to talk about the amazing layers there are in that cake, and say that it’s soft and sweet. How can you say this in type? What taste a letter has? What I’m trying to say is that there are people who restrict their inspiration by diving into the shallow end of things, instead of experiencing everything and finding inspiration from amidst all of that. I would really recommend to fight those limits and absorb everything, even a small talk between two people on the street, or the small statuettes in Oxford that cover the exterior of buildings, it’s amazing, like a mystical experience. A kind of Harry Potter thing, and it’s real, so why not to get inspiration from that? The world is full of materials that you can work with.

(Photo courtesy Lazo Kakou)

Typo-mohawk
A humble homage to the British '70-'80s Punk movement: the Typo-mohawk, worn during my talk at the London College of Communication.

Typembrya
Typembrya is the third experimental typo project in my 'Biotypography' series, and a personal homage to the Mother & Child logo, designed by the legendary Herb Lubalin in 1967.

As a paraphrase on the biotechnology definition, 'Biotypography' is a term that refers to any typographical application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to create or modify typographical phenomena. This short film shows a typographic mutation of an ampersand, inspired by current biotechnology methods.

Typo gods
I dreamt I was a typo-anthropologist who one day discovers a faded illustration of an interesting statue in an old encyclopedia. The statue looked like a strange synthesis of a human body and what looked like parts of type forms. Apparently this was an illustration of a shamanistic ritual idol from equatorial Africa, which arrived in the west with a group of slaves in the beginning of the 19th century.

F rat
Detail from the Biotypography typo art project. I have treated myself as a typographic scientist, that can produce, using biotechnological methods, this kind of creatures. This new creature is a cloned rat, that typographic information has been implanted into it's DNA.

Typo Shaman
Oded Ezer as the first Typo Shaman, founder of the worldwide typographic religion.

Tipografya
Designed for a poster exhibition in China; later became personal logo.

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